Electricity Generation and Delivery

ARPA-E announced up to $28 million in funding for a new program, ULtrahigh Temperature Impervious Materials Advancing Turbine Efficiency (ULTIMATE), in April 2020. The ULTIMATE program will fund projects to develop and demonstrate materials that can operate in the high temperature and high stress environment of a gas-turbine blade. Innovative technologies launched by the ULTIMATE program will specifically target gas turbine applications in the power generation and aviation industries.

ARPA-E focuses on next-generation energy innovation to create a sustainable energy future. The agency provides R&D support to businesses, universities, and national labs to develop technologies that could fundamentally change the way we get, use, and store energy. Since 2009, ARPA-E has provided approximately $2 billion in support to more than 800 energy technology projects. In January, we introduced a new series to highlight the transformational technology our project teams are developing across the energy portfolio. Check out these projects turning ideas into reality.

Our mission at ARPA-E may not include a focus on searching for long-lost treasure or fabled civilizations, but we do focus on finding and developing untapped energy resources, particularly using transformative energy technology. With the same spirit of discovery as explorers who search for the wealth rumored to rest within Atlantis, we recently announced our own search for untapped energy generation resources that lie over the horizon. The difference is that we know these resources exist, and our ATLANTIS project teams are working to access those offshore wind energy resources unreachable by traditional fixed-bottom offshore wind turbine designs.

As Dr. Atkinson’s term as an ARPA-E Program Director comes to a close, we sat down with him to reflect on his ARPA-E experience, the NEXTCAR program and the future of powertrain technologies, and what’s next for him.

One of the most popular parts of the yearly Summit is ARPA-E’s Technology Showcase, where current and previous ARPA-E awardees, as well as a select group others, display their projects for attendees to see, interact with, and experience themselves. No visit to the ARPA-E Summit is complete without a walk of the showcase floor, and since we’re less than one month out, we’ve put together a quick “cheat-sheet” on the this year’s Tech Showcase Demonstrations.

In July, ARPA-E will head west and bring the 10th ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit to Colorado. This annual conference and technology showcase convenes some of America’s best minds in business, academia, and government to focus on new and innovative ways to conquer America’s energy challenges.

Dr. Scott Hsu served as the Principal Investigator for Los Alamos National Laboratory’s ALPHA project from 2015-2018, where he led a team that designed and built a new, non-destructive driver technology that could enable more rapid experimentation and progress toward cost-effective fusion power. Now an ARPA-­E Program Director overseeing the ALPHA program’s conclusion and the development of new fusion programs, Dr. Hsu focuses on potentially transformative R&D to enable timely commercial fusion energy.

We sat down with ARPA-E Program Director, Dr. Rachel Slaybaugh, as she reflected on her experience attending the very first ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit Student Program back in 2010.